www.randstadsourceright.com
'selfie' generation: the new
workforce challenge
how can you better integrate this group of
self-determined, always-on group of workers?
by Steve Shepherd FRCSA (Life)
Employment Market Analyst, Asia Pacific
Randstad
O
ver the years, we have debated long
and hard the challenges of managing
Generation Y in the workforce, and
now we are grappling with how to adapt to
the demands of the Generation Z employee.
Sounds challenging, but I am not sure that
today's youth generations are much different
from the Boomers who came of age in the
60's or Generation X, who expressed their
individualism in the post-punk 80's.
Certainly I don't think that the attitudes, ideas, and aspirations of my
kids, who are both in their early 20's, are that different from the ones
I held at their age. Perhaps I have a clouded view of my youth, but
one thing I am sure that is different is the influence of technology
on generation Y and Z as well as on the Boomers and X'ers in the
workforce.
At the risk of sounding old, in my day if we wanted to source
information we spent hours in the library. Networking was a physical
activity where you actually met people and collected business cards or
created a Rolodex of relevant contacts who might be valuable to you
or your business. However, this imposed limits on the information and
networks we could access or the ideas we were exposed to.
The advent of the smartphone, search engines such as Google, and
social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook changed all of this
forever. And just as these changed the way we communicate, portals
such as eBay, freelancer.com, Upwork, and TaskRabbit are changing
how we think about work now and in the future.
